Catenaa, Thursday, February 12, 2026- SoftBank Group sprang back to a quarterly profit after investment gains from OpenAI neared $20 billion, as AI investments in tech companies start to pay off.
The Tokyo-based company has invested about $34.6 billion in OpenAI, accumulating an 11% stake as of December, and has been in talks to invest as much as $30 billion more in a round that would value the startup at about $750 billion to $830 billion.
As of December, SoftBank’s investment gain on OpenAI stood at $19.8 billion, the company said Thursday.
SoftBank’s bet in OpenAI is based on its visibility into the startup’s technology and business model, as well as communication with top management, SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said.
“We are investing in OpenAI with high conviction that the company will lead in developing AI,” he said. Regarding further commitments to the startup, “nothing concrete has been decided,” he said.
OpenAI now represents one of SoftBank’s biggest holdings, alongside a roughly 90% stake in chip designer Arm Holdings Plc, even as investments elsewhere slow.
That’s tethered the Japanese company’s shares to ChatGPT’s relative performance against rivals Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.
For the December quarter, SoftBank reported a net income of $1.6 billion in its fiscal third quarter, compared with the average analyst estimate of about $ 5.6 billion.
It was the tech investor’s fourth straight quarterly profit, a first for SoftBank since 2021, and came despite investment losses on share price drops in Coupang.
Over the past months, SoftBank has stepped up investments as Son seeks to play a bigger role in shaping the future of AI.
Last month, the company signed a $3 billion deal to buy private equity firm DigitalBridge Group, whose portfolio includes digital infrastructure companies such as AtlasEdge, DataBank, Switch, and Vantage Data Centers.
